How do you discern between the echo-chamber people and the smart people? After all those don’t have ‘my idea is good’ signs floating above their head, even if we would like that to happen.
That’s when knowledge of game design as well as research for the history of the genre comes into play… and I mean in-depth research for that.
Public feedback can be very good, depending on how it’s set up… or it can be a ridiculously damaging thing.
EHG generally does it because the have ‘no clue’ about what’s going on and things turn out to be contrary to their expectations… for now… for already ‘solved’ situations which work out generally for other games.
We could now say they’re either clueless or they’re exploring their own position still. The better option obviously it the latter as it promises to have better long-term outcomes. Nothing showcases it to be the actual case though since they’re lackluster in other regards which would be handled by now if they did that.
So as a end result I personally (personally, just to highlight it more it’s repeated) think that EHG is fairly clueless about some things.
They lacked to do their homework in my opinion, which is bad.
The solution is… them doing their homework and adjusting accordingly. A quite large portion of issues we’ve seen could’ve been avoided with proper research beforehand (MG state, patching during cycle, mid-cycle resets being a problem, end-game overhaul and dungeons being a bigger focus then some extra systems and so on).
If that’s done accordingly the game will be a lot better likely. That’s my opinion on that situation.
Actually, the 3 polls they did so far ended up with the majority of players agreeing with their stance, so it doesn’t seem like it was contrary to their expectations.
The problem is, everyone thinks that they are a “smart player” & that everyone who disagrees is a clown. Writing a long post doesn’t mean you’re smart.
Or, they want to get the feeling of a larger part of the community without having to read through hundreds of posts. Sadly, I’d be surpirsed if the polls were answered by a particularly large segment of the playerbase. But the principle of them is good.
“Man, I’ve got some information, all right. Certain things have come to light and, you know, has it ever occured to you that instead of, huh you know, running around blaming me, you know, given the nature of this new sh-t. This could be a lot more uh uh uh uh complex I mean, it’s not just… it might not be just such a simple uh you know ?
(…)
Well I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about. I’ve got information man, new sh*t has come to light and sh-t man…
…She kidnapped herself.”
– Some Dude in a limo.
Which would be a massive detriment and actively damaging since those posts provide a more detailed picture then a poll ever can.
A poll is to be made to either provide feedback purely for numbers on a unclear situation or to decide on the priority of the next changes, not to actively steer the game through specific details, that would more often then not be a problem as players commonly see the symptoms but rarely the root cause. It’s a prime way to create band-aids which in result over time cause the downfall of a product since the underlying issues aren’t ever addressed.
But overall agreed, polls can and are often - if done right - a boon. But not if it goes the direction you’ve mentioned, then it’s the opposite. Lazy actions are generally leading to bad outcomes, unless you’re ‘efficiently lazy’, which means reducing your workload by optimizing things.
All 3 polls happened in pretty much the same way: they made an announcement, there were a lot of posts with disagreeing opinions (and people disagreeing with their disagreeing arguments) and so they did a poll that only wanted to gauge how many people feel one way or another.
Seems like all polls were correctly done and fulfilled the purpose they set. They had already read the arguments for and against, all that remained was determining how many people felt one way or another. And in all 3 the majority of players agreed with EHG, meaning the dissenting voices were just a loud minority.
I keep seeing lot’s of references to PoE in relation to what EHG should or should not do. EHG should not be looking to emulate GGG or Blizzard and all the flaws that are in those games. They need to keep being better like with the stash tab priffinities and CoF/MG. While they have been really good at listening to the community they need to continue making the game that They want to Play.
People don’t come back to play old rpgs (last epoch is already 6+ years old) that had so many exploits on its ‘grand opening to the public’. Also the competition is too high, poe, poe2, d4, torchlight, soon titan quest and others.
Quited the game after i saw another dupe exploit being the case along with horrible optimization and all the devs have to offer for the upcoming couple months is a ‘not a new season’ not even promising that the exploits or performance are addressed. Not to mention the horrible mid cycle nerfs plaguing this game, that’s the worst balancing approach i’ve seen in online rpgs by far, zero motivation to play a strong build or game overall. Who is going to play this? what a joke.
You mean the system based on what GGG created?
It seems like you’ll have more rules to it, which just means that EHG looked at what GGG did and expanded on it.
Many things in LE are based on PoE or GD stuff and EHG adds their own spin on it. Monos are basically just maps meets delve, dungeons are kinda based on GD dungeons, arena is a sort of watered down simulacrum, passives/masteries are a twist on GD’s, etc.
So there is nothing wrong with looking at what others did and use or improve upon what they did right.
Yes, agreed!
Instead they should emulate the specific upsides of those, not the flaws.
Absolutely agreed… which does mean they nonetheless have to look at those games.
But in the real world you don’t always want War & Peace levels of feedback, that’s why polls & the “select 1-5 where 1=strongly agree & 5=strongly disagree” style of feedback exists. Its also much easier to consolidate large amounts of data to discern general trends with numerical data rather than text-based data (especially when there’s lots of it).
Exactly! So why do you think the devs are too stupid to know that?
No, that’s your assumption. You’re ascribing intent with no knowledge of any of the details.
They have fixed the exploits & said so in one of their posts about it. You likely didn’t see it since you quitted the game by then.
It would help if everyone agreed on what things were flaws & what were upsides. And yes, I’m aware that some things have more consensus than others, but tyranny of the majority isn’t always the best way to do things (especially creative things).
That’s true, and I’m not speaking against those polls. They are a secondary measure though after the direct feedback is taken in. To discern the detail, to work out the details even… not to steer large-scale direction though.
I don’t, I’m not saying they’re ‘too stupid’, that’s not even remotely what I’m arguing about.
They simply don’t know where to go, currently directionally challenged because of a lack of knowledge base in some areas. Which is detrimental.
Their polls represent that a little bit since the initial direction choice + the fairly minimalistic polls are not providing the ‘nuance’ to fine-tune it… having a 1-5 scale would already be better then what we got to decide on the exact way to do things.
It suffices though for the distinct questions given in the polls.
That’s the one detail I’m going for there.
And that described aspect is in 100% of the cases detrimental as free-form feedback provides more value then the provided methods of polling.
The method of polling used is solely to decide between some pre-created choices in that case, hence they already did read through the hundreds of polls.
Doing a 1-5 in that case would be detrimental. Doing a 1-5 poll when a large variety of points has been brought up to tune in on the sentiment on the other hand is once again viable.
Polls are a prime example of ‘tyranny of the majority’ though?
Yes, direct choices aren’t always the best, polls aren’t always the best, listening to the majority isn’t always the best… it needs to be combined at the right times respectively.
They are, but it should be noted that the current 3 polls were on issues that, while important in some measure, aren’t really critical to the game identity or gameplay.
Meaning that the really important stuff is decided without polls (though they still listen to the feedback, they don’t always follow it).
Polls aren’t going to give you detail though, they’ll give you the broad features (how many people have a mild/strong positive/negative reaction to a thing).
Long form feedback is for the details (specifically why a person feels X).
But you are very strongly implying that they’re either stupid or incompetent.
Polls don’t provide nuance though, not when you’reproviding a 5 point scale. If you’re expecting that then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Unless the poll has a lot of questions & you can do some correlation between then to interpolate some finer details (like psychometric testing does or attempts to do).
Not necessarily. Data analysis is significantly easier if you’re using numbers rather than several hundred words of text.
As much as i agree that the game could use some visual smoothness to become “newer”.
D4 had about 50 dupes / exploits on its grand opening, and pretty much every season since release new ones appear. We are talking about a company worth billions of dollars compared to a small indie company like EHG.
To be fair, PoE also had plenty of exploits and even dupes from the start (even leading to the mantra “exploit hard, exploit fast” among streamers). It’s just that GGG has gotten very good at fixing them very fast and also of managing to roll back the results of said exploits in a way that the vast majority of players aren’t even aware that there was an exploit going on.
